And at the center of it all was a 30-year-old, self-taught, stage-lighting whiz kid who went by the name of Chip Monck.

“I’m grateful for it, it was a wonderful experience,” said Monck, who went on to work with a list of who’s who of performers and big-name events through the decades that followed.

At 75 and living in Australia, he’s still at it.

And just as Woodstock was pivotal to Monck’s — and so many others’ careers — the three-day festival in the summer of 1969 came to be seen as a symbol of peace closing out a decade that was characterized by protest, violence and social upheaval.

“It’s part of the American story,” said Liz Schindler-Johnson of Grand Vision Foundation. “It defined a generation.”

The foundation is sponsoring the film as part of its Rockumentary film series, and the evening will include a flower-child costume contest.

Famously billed at the time as “3 days of peace & music,” Woodstock was praised for its celebratory fervor. But it has taken its share of criticism for other hallmarks of the event — drug use, sexual abandon, public nudity and mountains of trash left behind.

Monck, in a telephone interview this week with the Los Angeles News Group, recalled how he left his Boston home as a teenager seeking to do stagehand work in theaters of New York. He eventually wound up at the Village Gate, a nightclub that opened in 1959 and nurtured the early careers of performance greats like Bill Cosby, John Coltrane and a young poet by the name of Bob Dylan.

“He was a guy on the street and, while I was working (at the club), I had an apartment that was about 10 paces from the back door of the Gate,” Monck said. “Bob used to sit there (in my basement) and type all evening, that’s where he wrote some of his more magical numbers.”

Monck had already been tapped to work some of the big outdoor jazz and rock festivals that were gaining traction in the mid- to late-1960s when a young agent at William Morris Agency told him to call Michael Lang, who was putting together an event that was destined to trump them all — the Woodstock Music & Art Fair.

Advertisement

“He told me this kid was booking everything in Christendom,” said Monck, adding he signed on quickly after interviewing with Lang at his apartment.

Monck’s title: director of stage lighting and technical design. The pay for three days’ work: $7,000.

Attendance was expected to be no more than 200,000.

But as thousands began to show up early, it was clear that something big was in the making.

The nearly half a million young people who swarmed a primitive New York dairy farm field Aug. 15-17 sent organizers scrambling. Monck soon found himself ad-libbing as the show’s master of ceremonies.

“At 7 a.m. on the first morning, Michael tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Oh, by the way, we neglected to hire an emcee — and you’re it.’

“It started out with my knees knocking together, it was somewhat well beyond what I was capable of,” he said. “But it soon became sort of second nature. There were times when a parental sort of authority was needed, someone to tell them what was acceptable and what was not.”

Announcements ran the gamut, such as stage warnings about staying clear from the “brown acid” and getting the crowd to voluntarily step back 10 feet from the stage.

The brown acid danger “was a very difficult announcement to make because if you’ve taken it, what are you going to do?” he said. “I laughingly tried to defuse it, saying, ‘I’m selling the blue acid, which is much better.’ There wasn’t any, of course.”

Monck oversaw the lights, tarps and cables for the massive event, made sure artists were ready to perform, found a guitar for John Sebastian and provided supervision for another band member, Stephen Stills, who had “imbibed” a bit too much before showtime.

“The unifying factor was God threw a lot of water at us,” Monck said. “Everyone who owned sleeping bags or anything else saw them ooze into the mud never to be seen again.”

But many of the musical sets were brilliant, he said, recalling what was a star-studded lineup that included many of the era’s leading rock stars in full revolutionary bloom: Crosby, Stills & Nash, Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Richie Havens, Joan Baez; The Who, Joe Cocker, Arlo Guthrie, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, among them.

When it was all over, he hopped in a helicopter with Crosby, Stills and Nash and the Jefferson Airplane members for an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show with Joni Mitchell.

Monck’s role was to make sure the button-down television host would be comfortable with the musicians.

For Monck, who was given the Parnelli Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 for his work in the industry, the calls haven’t quit since Woodstock. He went on to tour with the Rolling Stones for five years and has worked on major Broadway shows and the 1996 Olympics.

He jokes that maybe he’ll quit working when he turns 86.

“It’s changed,” he said of the craft and the advent of social media, adding that, “I know I sound like Walter Brennan.”